Mama had not been pleased.
By the time she was five years old, Suraya understood that she was different. Nobody ever said it aloud—at least not to her face—but the difference was easy enough to measure. It was in the inches between her and the other kids when they sat on the colorful benches for breaktime snack; in the seconds that dragged by when the teacher told everyone to pick partners, her heart pounding so hard it felt like her whole body shook when nobody reached for her hand; in the twenty extra minutes she waited on her own after everyone else’s parents or grandparents or babysitters or maids had picked them up in a riot of cheerful chatter, because her mother had work to finish in the primary school where she taught; in the number of baju kurungs that filled her closet, the matching long tops and bottoms sewn by her mother from the cheap cotton she bought in bulk in the big town, so different from the other girls’ colorful skirts and dresses and T-shirts with cartoon characters on them.
Suraya tried her best not to mind this. It was, she told herself, a case of durians. Some people, like her mother, loved the creamy yellow insides of the spiky green fruit with a passion; some people, like Suraya herself, thought it both smelled and tasted like stinky feet. “It’s an acquired taste,” Mama had shrugged at her as Suraya wrinkled her little nose against the overpowering odor. “You’ll learn to like it one day.”
Maybe that was what she was. The durian of friends. Maybe people would learn to like her one day. Maybe she just had to meet the right ones.
So until they came around, Suraya kept herself busy. There was plenty to do: the letters in her books were starting to come together, forming delightful stories she could discover over and over again; the scenes and characters she conjured up in her head took shape in technicolor crayon on the pages and pages of old notebook paper Mama brought home for her use; and when she was done with those, there were trees to climb, paddy fields to splash through, bugs to investigate, fruit to pick off trees, and mud pies to make.
So when Pink came along, bursting out of his tiny grasshopper body to show her his true self, she looked at him with the same frank curiosity she looked at everything, and she smiled. When he offered her the seed of friendship, loneliness provided a soil so fertile that she buried it deep in her heart and let it grow and grow until it filled her and patched over the broken bits and made her whole.
“Tell me about my grandma, Mama,” Suraya said one evening, while she sat drawing a picture at the kitchen table, picking through markers and trying to choose the perfect colors for her unicorn as Mama made dinner.
She’d been puzzling over this in her head for what felt like ages now, like the mathematics she struggled with in school (Suraya was currently learning to subtract, and was not terribly pleased about it). If she had a grandma once, as Pink had told her, why had Mama never mentioned it? Why were there no stories, no pictures of her anywhere? The only way to find out, she figured, was to ask.
As the words left her lips, she saw her mother and felt Pink in her pocket both go perfectly still at exactly the same time.
“You don’t have one,” Mama said finally, her back to Suraya, then her knife resumed moving once more, a steady clack, clack, clack against the wooden chopping block as she decimated onions and carrots for the daging masak kicap.
Suraya frowned. “That’s im-poss-ible,” she said. It was a freshly acquired word, and she took a great deal of care in pronouncing it ever so carefully and with a great deal of relish. “Everyone has a grandma. You can’t not have a mama.”
“I did have one,” Mama said. “But not anymore. Not for a long time now.”
“Did she die?” Suraya understood death now that she was a whole five years old; she wasn’t a baby anymore, not like when she was four.
“Yes.”
“But what was she like when she was alive?” Suraya leaned forward eagerly, her drawing forgotten, the uncapped markers drying gently on the table. “What did she look like? What was it like when you were growing up? Did you—”
She had to stop then, because Mama had smacked the knife down on the counter and whirled around to face her, and in that moment she reminded Suraya of the sky right before rain begins to fall on the paddy fields, dark and heavy with a storm of epic proportions. But when Mama spoke, her voice was calm and even, each word slicing through the air like the knife she had just been wielding.
“We do not talk about your grandmother,” she said.
And they never did again.
Four
Girl
WHAT ARE YOU drawing now? Pink asked, clambering to the edge of Suraya’s notebook to try and take a peek. Suraya was eight now, tall and thin, with skin tanned a ruddy brown from constantly being out in the sun, and a wide, ready smile. Her dark hair obscured the pages of her notebook as she hunched over it on the bed, her pen moving quickly. Suraya never drew with pencil or crayons these days, only black ink.
(But what if you make mistakes? Pink would ask, but she only waved him off. “They’re never mistakes,” she told him. “Only chances to make something new.”)
“Shush, Pink,” she said now, distractedly. “I’m trying to get this right.” She’d been seeing a picture every time she closed her eyes, as though it was seared onto the back of her eyelids, and if she concentrated, she knew she could get it just right on the page.
Pink shrugged. Suit yourself, he said, settling into a sunny spot on the windowsill and stretching out his long grasshopper legs so that his entire body could bask in the warmth.
So caught up was Suraya in the movement of her pen, the deft strokes bringing to life an undersea world of swirling waters and the curve of a mermaid’s shimmering tail, that it took a while to register the sounds wafting in through her open window. When she finally looked up, she saw in the distance a group of children from the village—boys and girls of about Suraya’s age, cycling unsteadily through the trees on hand-me-down bicycles they still hadn’t quite grown into. They were children she’d grown up with her entire life—Kiran, with the wide smile and the mass of dark curls; little Ariana, with her short bob and perpetual sniff, the two of them always arm in arm and whispering secrets to each other; Aiman, Ariana’s older brother, with his shaggy haircut and an ever-changing map of scars and bruises from his various adventures; David, who once covered himself in glory by chasing a snake off the playground and away from a group of shrieking younger children; and Faris, who had once disastrously tried to hold Suraya’s hand while waiting in line for the ice cream man and hadn’t really been able to look at her since.
They’d tossed their bicycles aside now and were laughing and shrieking together in a carefree way that made Suraya wince, sending a peculiar pang rocketing through her chest. She saw these kids every day, sat with them in the classroom, knew their names and their families and the scabs on their knees—but when she was around, there was none of this camaraderie, this easy companionship they shared, Kiran’s head bent close to Ariana’s, David’s arm looped easily over Faris’s shoulders, Aiman cracking jokes to make all of them giggle. For a moment she imagined herself among them. For a moment she wondered what it felt like to belong.
Pink hopped off the windowsill and sprang onto the bed beside her.